The center of my belly is heavy with longing. I miss everything. I miss that far up North place that rains all the time. I miss every moment of my life that has already happened. I guess it is good to mourn what has already been to make room for what might come.
This week, my friend Daniel is headed to Portland for the first time. Daniel is a tall, long, lovely man that lives and works on the ranch. He is about as dear and honest as 28-year-old men come, and for that, among other charming qualities, I am endeared to him. I gave him a map and tried to help him orient himself. I also gave him a treasure-map-like list of my favorite places. He was excited and slightly overwhelmed, saying, “Wow. Portland is a big city.” This of course is totally sweet coming from a man who has spent the last several years in the remoteness of Big Sur.
This morning, at work in the café, my first customer was a man whom I have chatted with on a few Saturday morning occasions while I make his coffee. He remembered that I had moved to Big Sur from Portland and we both spoke kind words and affections for the city.
“Portland is the size of a town with all the best parts of a city,” he said.
Yes. Yes it is. I am getting a little tired of praising this place I have fled. My praises in general conversation are starting to feel like I am eating my words, as I continue to question if I am gone from that place for good, or if there is still a home for me to inhabit there.
I drove home in the rain, winding along Highway One, the mountains and hillsides blurred in fog, waves crashing relentlessly. I continue to think about Portland, about Oregon, about the long stretch of highway between here and there. I wish I could stop the car and go walking in the rain, get soaked to the bone, my clothing sticking to my skin. Instead, the tired winter sun is going down, and I am going to take a hot shower. I am going to set up the studio for teaching a printmaking workshop tomorrow. I am going to go to bed early. I am going to try to not fall off the edge of this longing.
How come I know that I can become anything, but don’t feel like I am much? I think that part of what I’m meeting right now is that I would like to do all the things one could do from 19-29. I want to have several careers, live in countless areas and towns. I want to be a farmer and grow garlic. I want to spend a summer in Vermont and one on Lake Michigan. I want to work at summer camps and take teenagers backpacking. I want to be a whitewater guide in several states and countries. I want to work in a bakery and make flaky pastries. I want to be a jazz dancer and wear legwarmers. I want to write songs like Patty Griffin. I want to work for a magazine and do interviews with interesting people and write reviews of places and things. I want to be a printmaker and make handmade clothing. I want to go walking every day. But it turns out, no matter my want to do this last decade over and over again in several series of choices, I am at the end of it, which feels remarkably different than any other point in life so far, and far more different than I expected it to feel. Time is a thing I cannot stop. And it turns out, I would like a place that feels like home.
I do not know what to do in my life.
After college, I lived for a stint in the southeast corner of Tennessee along the Ocoee River and in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. I was 23 and found myself in a personal place not too different than I stand in now – a profound sort of openness, but with six less years of decisions and living. In my final few weeks in North Carolina, before I moved to Oregon, I went camping by myself in the Pisgah National Forest. It was a summer weekend. I’d borrowed by roommate’s tent. I’d brought candles to set up on the picnic table to read Annie Dillard talk about moths getting burned up in candle flames in an Appalachian forest, just like this, a bit further North. Before I blew out those candles, I would also write about what I thought I was headed for, and what I was leaving behind. Once asleep, a great downpour began that would last through the night and well into the next day. In the morning, despite the rain, I kept to my plan and began hiking the few miles up to Looking Glass Rock – a hike I had done once before a few years earlier. The trail was more of a stream, water flowing steadily down the rocks and roots, steep enough to avoid making much mud.
I wore my favorite dress, one that still travels with me now, made of very thin fabric with a subtle and fragile floral print. It is sleeveless with inch-wide straps and an uneven hem, one side dancing even with my knee and the other near my mid-thigh.
I wore it in the pouring rain with a pair of Chaco sandals. I do not think I wore a rain jacket. I no longer thought about what awaited me in Oregon or the few weeks travel across the country. I no longer thought about what I was leaving behind in those forests and old, old mountains. I was walking up a rushing stream trail, through the trees, along switchbacks, in a dress, in the pouring summer rain.
A few months earlier, I had made my first visit to the state of Oregon. It was late April and it was the first time I had ever traveled solo to a city where I did not know anyone at all. It rained, of course, though it was a spring rain where the sky was in constant motion, clouds moving swiftly, heavy rain falling for a few minutes and then the sky opening in sunshine. This pattern repeated through a whole day, with several longer stints of rain as well. I was deep on east coast time, and woke up around 5 o’clock each morning. I went with it. I would quietly locate my clothes at the foot of my twin bed at the hostel on Hawthorne Avenue and slip away without waking my neighbors. One of these mornings, I drove myself through the rain to the ocean. A woman who would later teach me how to make books and approach art as gift-giving, told me about a place on the coast called the Three Capes Loop. She suggested I visit it during my weekend stay. So, at 5 o’clock in the morning rain, I was on my way.
This is a road I would end up driving countless times during my five years in Portland. But this first time remains vivid, with its rolling hills, and clear-cuts matched with deep, tall forests, covered in thick moss and lichen, all shades of green I had never before seen. It was foreign and soaking wet and it completely took up residence in my soul.
Once I arrived at the ocean, I navigated to a trailhead; one that, at least in my memory, is nameless. I followed the trail down a forested hillside toward the ocean. Here, on this mudded trail, I encountered my first banana slug, yellow and spotted, and as long as the tip of my middle finger to the joint of my wrist when it was elongated. I counted each slug I met on this walk, 17 in total. The trail ended abruptly on a muddy slope right above an out-cropping of jagged rocks with the ocean crashing into their fierce and sturdy faces. This moment, in an early morning coastal downpour, watching waves crash into the rocks, sending spray up to join the rain on my face, is when I decided to move to Oregon.
Maybe we belong where we end up. Maybe all this rain-walking is another way of lying on the ground and giving up. I am due for getting washed over and somehow knowing right where I want to be. I am ready to be affected, and show up soaking wet.
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